Madoff Figure Sued By Cuomo Gave Nearly 1/2 Million to Dems, Some to Simmons, too.

The New York Times reports this morning, “Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York on Tuesday charged a unit of Bank of New York Mellon and two former executives with fraud, saying they failed to disclose information that pointed to problems at Bernard L. Madoff Investments.”  One of the two former executives was the company’s chief investment advisor, Howard Wohl.

These sorts of grim stories send me to OpenSecrets.org because people who make tens of millions misleading their clients and customers are natural allies for politicians.  Howard Wohl made many friends in politics.  In the last decade, according to OpenSecrets.org, the Ivy Asset Management executive, which was purchased by Bank of New York Mellon in 2000, has given $476,048 to federal campaign committees.  Nearly all of it went to Democrats, donating $25,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as recently as December 18, 2009.  That was a nice holiday check to receive to help vacationing Martha Coakley in her Massachusetts special election on January 19th.

The accused scammer could still afford to make eye-popping political contributions to Democrats because, according to The New York Post, he’d recommended Ivy “withdraw all of the funds they personally managed from Ivy.”

Wohl gave $30,400 to the DCCC in February of last year.  The four pages of contributions is a roll call of familiar Democrats. They include Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, John Kerry, Charles Schumer, Carolyn McCarthy, Russell Feingold, and Tom Daschle.  Bizarre former Congressman Eric Massa earns a couple of entries, too.

The accused scammer favored a handful of Republicans with his suspicious fortune.  In the last decade he donated $7,000 to the GOP.  One of the recipients of $1,000 contributions was Connecticut Republican Senate hopeful Rob Simmons, who banked the Wohl cha-ching in the last days of his narrow defeat for a third tern in Congress in 2006.

Let’s see who divest themselves of what the Post calls “poison ivy.”